Searching for the okapi: is there a history of thalidomide in (South) Africa?

Work-in-genesis, work-in-progress, this is an attempt to sketch the background to an
emerging research project the outcomes of which are as yet uncertain, but which will
explore an absence, a curious incidence of something that did not happen. For, in the
absence of bodies characteristic (though variously formed) of the in utero presence of
the substance, it has become conventional wisdom that there are no histories to be told
of thalidomide in South Africa, or in the continent more widely. This paper begins to
question that view and asks, if there was indeed no ‘epidemic of thalidomide’ in the
continent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, why not, for Africa was certainly
projected as a market for the drug. Moreover, it can also be asked (though not
answered or explored in any depth in the current paper) why it is that there are no
officially reported instances of disabilities arising from the use of thalidomide in the
continent for the treatment of leprosy in the 1970s and 1980s; or more recently, in
treatments for some cancers and conditions associated with HIV/AIDS? The answers
are not self-evident and indeed are themselves of interest not merely as counterfactual
histories, but as explorations in their own right of several aspects of African
history: inter alia of Cold War and Commonwealth era flows of capital and
pharmaceuticals, which in turn were linked to imperial economies of underdevelopment;
of the penetration of biomedicine and its institutions; of the statistical
state and the monitoring of and local response to children born with birth defects; of
debates about eugenics and reproductive rights; and of course, of the histories in
Africa of pharmacology and public health.